Starlink and satellite internet: how the new sky ISP works
Low-Earth-orbit dishes, why your IP city looks wrong, CGNAT, latency tradeoffs, and who satellite broadband is actually for.
For most of modern internet history, getting online meant a wire into a wall or a cell tower within a few kilometers. Satellite internet used to mean slow, expensive dishes aimed at birds parked over the equator, with lag so bad that video calls felt like shouting down a well. Then low-Earth-orbit constellations — Starlink most famously — started filling the sky with thousands of smaller satellites, and rural rooftops that never saw fiber suddenly got speeds that looked suburban.
The tech is real. The tradeoffs are physical, and they show up in your IP address, your latency, and who can see your traffic.
How does Starlink-style internet actually work?
A dish on your roof talks to satellites racing overhead a few hundred kilometers up. Those satellites hand traffic to other satellites or down to ground stations connected to the regular internet. Because the satellites are closer than old geostationary ones, the delay drops from hundreds of milliseconds toward something usable for Zoom and games — not always cable-good, but often good enough.
The network is still the internet. Your packets still leave a public IP somewhere. Check what is my IP on a Starlink connection and you will usually see an address owned by the satellite provider, often in a different city or even country than your dish, depending on how they route and which ground gateway you hit.
Why does the IP location look wrong?
Same reason mobile IPs look wrong, amplified. The geolocation databases map IP blocks to where the provider registers them — data centers and gateways — not to your farmhouse. A dish in Montana can show up as Seattle or elsewhere. VPNs on top of Starlink stack another layer of confusion. If you are troubleshooting "wrong city," start by remembering satellite broadband is not a street-level locator.
Carrier-grade NAT is common too: many customers share public IPs. That can break hosting a game server from home or some remote-access setups that need a clean inbound path.
What are the real limits?
Obstructions — trees, hills, rain fade. Congestion when too many dishes share a cell. Power and clear sky view. And geopolitics: countries have banned, restricted, or fought over who controls terminal access. Terminals are tracked inventory. "Just point at the sky" is the marketing sentence; licensing and export rules are the fine print.
Latency varies by route. A video call might feel fine while a competitive shooter feels off. Measure with a latency test on a quiet evening before you blame the game.
Who is this for?
People fiber forgot: rural homes, ships, remote sites, backup links when the cable dies. It is less compelling in a city with cheap gigabit, where a dish is mostly redundancy or curiosity.
Satellite broadband did not invent privacy. It changed the last mile. Your traffic still exits through someone else's network, still carries a public IP, and still benefits from HTTPS and a careful VPN if you need a different exit. The sky got crowded. The basics of "who sees my packets" did not retire.